Making intranet weblog data usable.
This is indeed very informative stuff. I found the timeline at the
beginning interesting; it highlights the correlation between financial
constraints and the adoption of lightweight tools that are useful to
individuals.
Excellent presentation on supporting K-logging within a large organisation. Lucent
Technologies' Information Specialist, Michael Angeles, believes
blogging has evolved beyond "cool" and is moving quickly into the
corporate world. In this presentation, Angeles will discuss who blogs,
how and why. He will also discuss how Lucent is supporting bloggers and
at the same time keeping close watch over the resulting growth of
information on the Intranet. [...]
Idle Words on an amusing mutation of the Turing test that recently played out on the Web. Given an online forum in which only text is exchanged, a group of participants tried to determine whether one of them really was (former Pixies frontman) Frank Black.
"The Structure of Pattern Languages", by mathematician/architect Nikos A. Salingaros
offers a good overview of the pattern idea. There's a neat riff on the
interdependence of patterns in the electronic and physical worlds:
On
top of the existing path structure governed by Alexandrine patterns
(Salingaros, 1998), we need to develop rules for electronic
connectivity (Droege, 1997; Graham and Marvin, 1996). To define a
coherent, working urban fabric, the pattern language of electronic
connections (which is only now being developed) must tie in
seamlessly to the language for physical connections. Already, some
authors misleadingly declare that the city is made redundant by
electronic connectivity. Such opinions ignore new observed patterns,
which correlate electronic nodes to physical nodes in the pedestrian
urban fabric. The two pattern languages will most likely complement
and reinforce each other.
(if you feel like digging further into this, be sure to check out Marc Demarest's excellent Cities of Text, which is chock-full of parallels between human settlements and intranets)
I liked the part towards the end called "Stylistic rules and the
replication of viruses",
where Salingaros describes how arbitrary rules sometimes drive the
widespread adoption of superficial features for no good reason. I see a
connection here to Clay's ideas on process as an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. and to Joel Spolsky's "Talent Doesn't Scale" argument. Successful recipes get replicated out of the context in which they were relevant.
